CHAPTER 3

How 21st Century Rain makers Think and Act?

Top sales luminaries cannot consciously describe how they perform their own sales magic.

—Dr Donald Moine

All marketing and selling skills are learnable, and I believe, any professional can sharpen their skills; naturally, some will develop into better salespeople than others and skill level will vary from high to low just as they do in all professions.

A recruiter once told me there is one constant demand from his business clients, to find someone to sell their products and services, they want a natural born salespeople. Numerous tests have been devised to unearth sales abilities. Unfortunately, as most employers have discovered, the born salesperson is a myth no such person exists.

The simple fact is outstanding salespeople are made—developed—not born. Selling is an acquired skill, and one that can be developed to some degrees by anyone. Top professionals develop and hone their skills through diligent study and practice on the fundamental techniques.

I have observed from working with and coaching top professionals seven ways to think and act:

Concept mindset

Think big goals

Focused

Think process

Deep motivation

Optimistic

Action oriented

What Is a Concept Mindset?

Top professionals understand that sales performance starts with you and your philosophy of selling. The kind of person you are, your ambitions, your motives, and ethics. Everyone already has a philosophy whether they are aware of it or not; your attitude and beliefs determine this toward selling. Your happiness and success in selling should stand upon a sound philosophy of sale; this is so fundamental and important when you combine skill in marketing with a deep-seated belief in the benefits of your offering that you have the unbeatable combination.

A sound philosophy is not only true for top sales professionals but for great leaders of history were those with strong convictions that cause was right with the ability to persuade others to follow them, such as, Winston Churchill, Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln are examples of the power created by combining sales ability with conviction.

Your sales philosophy impacts your integrity and work ethics. Professionals with poor work ethics are often lying to themselves by playing games, motived and doing the work required to be successful, in reality, they are afraid and procrastinating. This has a flow on effect, over promising, under delivering, or worse, lying to customers and prospects—a road that leads to nowhere.

A well thought out sales philosophy helps rain makers to become fearless in their marketing and selling. Developing your sales philosophy begins with understanding your “Big Why” clarifying the kind of person you are, your ambitions, motives, and ethics.

Your sales philosophy and integrity are closely linked. Begin examining your philosophy, by asking yourself these two questions:

On September 11, 2001, DK an insurance executive life changed. His best friend never made it home that night. The man “didn’t have a life insurance agent. Didn’t have a financial adviser. Didn’t have an estate attorney or anything like that,” DK said. “He had very little protection for his family.” His friend knew he needed to fix that. But he ran out of time, and his family left without protection coverage when he died unexpectedly. What happened to his family was a tragedy, DK made the decision immediately that he was going to focus the rest of his career on making sure there are fewer people like that tomorrow than there are today. It has culminated in DK’s sales philosophy that has helped him guide one of the largest life insurers in the United States.

Do you see selling as a high calling requiring a great degree of skill, knowledge, character, and integrity?

Or do you see it as a way to make money quickly—with no holds barred on any tactics, justified as long as you make a sale?

Your “Big Why”

Defines and helps you to remain the focused on your concept. Professionals who understand their “Big Why” and concept focus usually outperform those who are solely product focused. They are customer centered, obtaining more repeat business, and higher retention rates because they take the long view with their customers. Your “Big Why” is critical when establishing your goals both personally and professionally.

Think Big Goals

Top performers understand the power of setting goals, they think big, as opposed to small, overly cautious, hesitant. Little plans lack the magic that stirs the blood. They are thrilled by the chance of testing themselves with a long stretch on a limb.

There are two types of goals—personal and professional. Our focus is your professional production goals you set for yourself and career. Yearly goals will never be reached without the setting of achieving short-term goals.

Rain maker live and sell on a day-to-day basis; they know what needs accomplishing on a short-term basis as well. Reaching a yearly goal is reaching a series of weekly and monthly goals. Top performers understand the importance of the power of setting big goals to their goals and work backwards to build good solid habits to achieve them. As you place your goals, you need to establish practices to reach them.

Top professionals do all those necessary things to achieve success, including getting rid of procrastination, distractions, and whatever is preventing them from controlling themselves. Self-discipline is being a self-starter and taking charge of yourself, developing the right attitude, including taking responsibility for their learning and development rising, enabling them to serve their clients better.

Great habits lead the big goals to help you to grow into your goals. The goals that I am referring to are your production goals to propel your career. There are different types of goals, physical, personal, family, and so forth. These are all important, and all top professionals should have them. Goal setting will be covered thoroughly in Chapter 11.

Seven Professional Goal Categories

Focus

New Customers

Retention

Revenue

Prospects

New customers

Average revenue per customer

Prospect quality

Focus

By creating groups, your goals tracking become simpler and highly focused. You simply run down the list and fill in the blanks; this is the most effective and efficient way to set goals and to focus your attention and efforts of those areas that will impact your businesses. Goal categories act as placeholders that need your attention; everyone needs to understand how their numbers work

New Customers

New customers are essential; it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that selling more to existing clients is more than adequate to drive growth. The reality is clients move on, retire, go out of business, circumstances change, and so forth. So you need to continually broaden your base with new clients each year continually. Set a goal to surpass the previous new customers results.

Retention

Retention includes the total income a customer generates. If your average revenue per customer is $1,000 and in the following year, there’s a reduction in pricing by 10 percent, you retain the same number of customers your retention rate has reduced from 100 to 90 percent, and your revenue has also decreased by 10 percent. Ultimately, your retention goal should be 100 percent of your desired customers.

Average Revenue Per Customers

There are only three ways to increase your revenue: first by increasing the average size of each sale, second acquiring larger customers, and third, by selling more to your existing customers.

Prospect Quality

Your sales pipeline is an indicator of future business success; you should establish goals for each stage, including lead generation, presentations and closing to ensure you maintain an overflowing pipeline. If your retention goal is to keep 100 percent of your desired clients, then 80 percent of your annual sales budget is already achieved, so your sales pipeline goal should be to have 30 percent growth to guarantee the other 20 percent. When this happens, selling becomes fun.

Client Development

To achieve 100 percent retention, you need full-time customers. For the top 20 percent of customers, you are their number one and only source; your goals, 100 percent of your top 20 percent of customers are full-time.

Referrals

There are two types of referrals, unsolicited and pro-active. With the former, your customers provide you with names and introductions and the latter you educate and ask your top customers for names and introductions. Referrals are a vast untapped source for new business that many professionals under-utilize.

Professional Development

A professional career does not standstill. As you establish your goals, ask yourself, what new information and habits do I need to learn to support my goals? Professional development should be continuous, including conferences, books, seminars, workshops to keep up. Doctors, lawyers, and accountants are required to undergo professional development to keep up with new advances and legislation changes. The same should apply within the profession of selling.

Ben Feldman’s success came down to having a straightforward goal formula of just three sales per week. His goal never changed. What did change, however, was the value of those three sales each week, to where they were worth millions of dollars. Even up to the last days of his career, he worked well into his 80’s. Ben’s goal was still three sales per week. Top performers establish their goals and break them down; this gives them the platform to set their planning for the year.

What About Focus?

John Savage once said, “Work eight hours, sleep eight hours, just make sure it’s not the same eight hours.” What he meant was, when you leave home to go to work, try doing it. Focus is about understanding and implementing your “Big Why” the way you do the things that you do.

Become concept focused, role as a rain maker is a means to an end to help your clients achieve their objectives. Understanding your purpose leads to clarity and focus making it easier to prioritize your time, resources balancing your career, and personal life. Successful salespeople often seem to make everything look effortless, while average performers around them are working 60 to 70 hours per week just to keep their head above water. Top performers are very clear about their reasons “why” this is what fuels their success.

Think Process

Top performers early in their careers adopt a fake it until you make it mentality through practice, hard works of producing results acquired an impossible to fail mentality. When I was just starting out in my financial services career, working for an international insurance company, the first time I was presented (told) of my sales target, I thought there was no way I was ever going achieve it. However, once the goal was set (in my case, it was handed to me), I acted fearlessly, and things started to come into play, and developing the right habits, I grew into the goal.

As I sought help from more experienced professionals, asked lots of questions and focused my efforts, it was not long before I became very efficient at recognizing new business opportunities, retaining 100 percent of my key accounts and successfully upselling existing clients. The result, I exceeded my initial unachievable budget by 20 percent and continued to do so for the next several years.

Top rain makers develop their impossible to fail attitude by creating sales processes for the types of business for the ideal clients. By trusting their process, they understand if they follow it, the results will take care of themselves.

What About Motivation?

Becoming a successful rain maker is not complicated, but it is difficult. To execute your plans every day, you must have a deep level of motivation to fuel the process. Successful rain makers make themselves execute the fundamentals, while the less successful cannot. And having a sustained level of motivation is essential. It starts with establishing the right goals and working in milestones. Ben Feldman broke his goals down to just three sales per week; this was simple and easy to follow; it helped keep him motivated toward his goals each week and the related task.

Using your sales process to track exactly where prospective clients are at each stage and help motivate you to move them from one step to the next in your pipeline and eventually to convert them into new clients and revenue. Each step becomes a mini goal to achieving your main goals.

I regularly work out in the gym several days a week (I used to be a competitive powerlifter), now I just compete with myself “can I go a couple of pounds heavier on the bench press than I did last week?” These mini goals help me to keep my workouts exciting and productive. It allows me to set my own goals and the motivation to achieve them. Top rain makers trust their process and focus on focusing them on the milestones to stay motivated.

What About Action?

The very best gamify (not sure this is an actual word) their business task to turn business development activities into a game to make it more exciting or enjoyable. Rain makers are action oriented; they set business and activity goals and track their process, developing the motivation to fuel their process and action to turn their plans into reality, with regular practice, these become habits.

Jerry Seinfeld, one of the world’s most successful comedians, learned early in his career how to gamify the task of writing jokes (a vital tool for a comedian) to beat procrastination using a big calendar he hung on a prominent wall. Every day Jerry wrote a joke, he’d put an x through that day, the days turned into a few weeks, and finally, a chain of days of x’s on his calendar that he refused to break. Gamifying, his works allowed Seinfeld to create thousands of jokes that he uses regularly to entertain audiences

Lack of Action is the number one thing that prevented hardworking professionals developing promising careers. They set their goals, developed sales plans that outline they must see x number of people per day to achieve their goal, but they never take action, by doing a little bit each day. For example, identifying a certain amount of new names every day to add to their prospect list.

Professionals who fail to obtain new names each day don’t because they are unable to think about it. The cure is to devise a plan and gamify it that will not permit you to forget to do it. Doing a little bit of marketing daily, sometimes 15, 20, 30 minutes a day, is a lot better than trying to do three, four, or five hours a day or work in a crisis mode.

What About Optimism?

There is a famous joke about a child who wakes up on Christmas morning surprised to find a heap of horse manure under the tree instead of a collection of presents. Yet, the child is not discouraged because he has an extraordinarily optimistic outlook on life. His parents find him enthusiastically shoveling the manure as he exclaims, “With all this manure, there must be a pony somewhere!” Selling is hard work. It’s one of the most challenging jobs in the world. You face continual rejection, potential failure, and persistent disappointment, setbacks, obstacles, and difficulties that are not experienced by most people.

Rain makers are optimistic; they understand the reality that selling is not easy; it has never been easy; it will never be easy, however, your attitude will ultimately account for a large part of your success. It’s the outward expression of everything you are. A positive attitude toward life and the inevitable ups and downs is a trait that successful rain makers share. If you ask for a referral, what’s the worst thing going to happen?

Your scheduled meeting with a prospective client does not go to plan, or worst still they cancel. How do you think when bad things happen? When this does happen, and in selling, it will, the pessimist thinks, “It’s all my fault” even when there is nothing they could have done to change the outcome. Optimists, on the other hand, think when bad things happen that they are not accountable for all of it and while it might ruin their day, it won’t ruin their life. They isolate the ill effects. When good things happen, the pessimist says, “I had nothing to do with it”, the Optimist on the other hand says, I caused it. The pessimist says, “It won’t last”, the Optimist says “It’s going to last forever”.

Marshall Goldsmith writes: “Optimism [is] not only feeling it inside but showing it on the outside—a magic move. People are automatically drawn to a confident individual who believes everything will work out.”

Some people are born with a deep-seated optimism personality trait. Some are an overly optimistic assessment of their abilities in areas where they lacked expertise can cause difficulty. Confidence is a skill, and many people can become more optimistic, and most people can learn enough to succeed in sales.

Case Study

Billy was in a sales slump, he asked for me to spend the day observing and provide some feedback to help improve his performance. Billy scheduled seven appointments, five with existing customers and two with prospective customers. The first two meetings with existing customers did not go well. I spoke to Billy about his “Big Why” (sales concept) he had not given this any thought, he just knows that he was supposed to sell. I asked him a few questions about his motivations, ethics, and beliefs on the positive outcomes of his services.

We turned his answers into his selling concepts. He copied this onto a

3 × 5 card that he kept in the briefcase. For the rest of the day, before each call, I suggested he reads his sales concept before each meeting to remind him of the great value he provides for his customers. I told him, “Some days clients will rain on your parade”, and your sales philosophy will keep you grounded. The great success is the rest of the day, even picking up a new customer. Billy went on to become a solid performer for his firm, consistently exceeding his growth targets.

Summary

All the marketing and selling skills are learnable.

Seven key traits and characteristics of successful salespeople process:

image Think concept

image Think big goals

image Think focus

image Think process

image Think motivation

image Think optimism

image Think action

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